Should we mindlessly applaud this drive toward exactitude as an obvious good? Winchester is reverent about the engineers he profiles, but he also sees the other side. As he travels east and showcases Japanese devotion to craftsmanship, particularly highlighted in that country’s manufacture of precise timepieces, he reminds us of the beauty of imperfections as seen in bamboo handicrafts and handmade lacquerware, the inexactness of nature adding subtle eccentricities to our creations and, with them, charm. The Perfectionists succeeds resoundingly in making us think more deeply about the everyday objects we take for granted. It challenges us to reflect on our progress as humans and what has made it possible. It is interesting, informative, exciting and emotional, and for anyone with even some curiosity about what makes the machines of our world work as well as they do, it’s a real treat.
Mr. Winchester covers more than 200 years of fine-tuning in this work, and corrals a large cast of eccentric individuals ... Personally, Mr. Winchester professes a preference, even a passion, for the imprecise ... Not all parts of the book fit precisely together. Mr. Winchester inserts many footnotes (appearing every few pages in some chapters) that supply all sorts of ancillary information: a line of poetry, a bit of historical background, a fine point of definition, an amusing factlet. But the footnotes are just as likely to contain pertinent material that could have, should have been incorporated into the main body of the text rather than relegated to a dozen or more lines of tiny type ... If we fail to accept the equal value of the natural order, the author warns, 'then nature will in time overrun ... none shall survive—no matter how precise' ... brighter prospect glimmers in the interesting afterword that Mr. Winchester appends about metrology, the science of measurement. Here he offers a brief history of standard units such as the meter and the kilogram. The process cheers him considerably ... the 'duration by which, fundamentally, we measure everything that we make and use, and which in turn helps establish for us with unfailing exactitude the precision that allows the modern world to function.'
Winchester is a champion humanizer; it's the foremost of his many writing skills. He sifts through the historical record, builds impressive bibliographies, and then crafts it all into three-dimensional characters ... Winchester carefully and entertainingly furthers his story from mechanics to precision to hyper-precision of the kind that, for example, led to the great line of Leica lenses prized by photographers for decades ... The story Winchester tells is one of steady, almost inexorably increasing complexity, and this can make the book's later sections heavier going for the lay reader ... It's a testament to Winchester's narrative skill, honed over two dozen books, that he makes even the most arcane of technical specifics smoothly comprehensible in context ... The Perfectionists is at heart an account of the unsung heroes of our modern world.
The book’s complicated scientific explanations have the potential to be tedious (at least to nonengineers like me), but Winchester’s prose is engaging, describing concepts like the role of precision time-keeping in the development of GPS, and the mind-boggling set of factors that allow a jet engine to power an enormous airplane without the engine overheating and melting. A late chapter gets a little philosophical, weighing the gains and losses that precision has brought us as Winchester delves into the history of the Seiko Watch Company in Japan, where craft and precision work side by side. But what remains with me are the stories from Winchester’s life, as well as those of the men (yes, almost all men) who measured, tinkered and persevered to build, for better or worse, our ultraprecision-driven world.
While Winchester underscores the importance these men’s contributions have ultimately made to today’s world of endlessly reproducible goods, he also contemplates whether in all this sameness and precision there isn’t still room for less accurate but no less valuable craftsmanship. Another gem from one of the world’s justly celebrated historians specializing in unusual and always fascinating subjects and people.
Winchester examines how a desire for precision has driven technological progress and often been a prerequisite for it ... Along the way, he tells stories about finely balanced Rolls Royce engines, Leica cameras and their prized lenses, and the Hubble Space Telescope, whose mirror was carefully ground to exactly the wrong shape, 'precisely imprecise,' as he puts it ... The book’s gimmick of ordering chapters by degrees of precision is actually quite logical, because precision is necessary to achieve precision ... There is no way for a story on this subject to be comprehensive, because precision has been a pursuit of so many areas of manufacturing, science and technology. Winchester therefore has had to be selective.
An ingenious argument that the dazzling advances that produced the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, and the revolutions that followed owe their success to a single engineering element: precision ... Less a work of scholarship than an enthusiastic popular-science tour of technological marvels, and readers will love the ride.
Winchester (The Professor and the Madman) smoothly mixes history, science, and biographical sketches to pay homage to the work of precision engineers, whom he credits with the creation of everything from unpickable locks to gravity wave detectors and the Hubble Telescope ... Winchester’s latest is a rollicking work of pop science that entertains and informs.
